A Paper on the Star Wars Force-Enabling Midi-Chlorians Gets Published by FOUR Scientific Journals

If you ever hear anyone quote ‘facts’ to you from a scientific journal, this story may give you pause. An anonymous person was able to submit a paper to a scientific journal that was made up from whole chunks of dialogue from Star Wars movies, and worst, from the prequals, not the original trilogy.

The trolling scientist submitted a paper on midi-chlorians to a scientific journal and guess what? It got published! Here’s more delights below.

from entertainment.ie/

Well, to be more specific, a neuroscientist got a paper on midi-chlorians – that’s the microscopic cells that give a Jedi his or her powers – published in four dodgy scientific journals.

Remember in The Phantom Menace when Liam Neeson, being the pro that he is, rattled off some of the worst dialogue in cinematic history that explained midi-chlorians? No? Let’s dredge up some bad memories with a clip.

VIDEO:

You’re probably wondering why any scientific journal would actually publish a paper on a completely fictional bit of science that has absolutely no relevance in the real world, right? Well, as it turns out, there’s an entire industry of so-called predatory journals that will basically publish anything and everything you send them. So much so, in fact, that one neuroscientist wanted to see how far they could push it.

The neuroscientist, who blogs anonymously under the name Neuroskeptic, pulled full paragraphs from the Wikipedia article relating to mitochondrion, reworded them and then slapped them into the paper. Mitochondrion is real, by the way, and has to do with DNA. Not only that, the paper also dropped in whole swathes of dialogue from Revenge Of The Sith – namely, the Darth Plagueis The Wise speech – and nobody even clocked it. There’s even mentions of Wookiee’s Disease, JARJAR Syndrome and Lightsaber‘s hereditary optic neuropathy.

Yes, really.

The paper was published on International Journal of Molecular Biology: Open Access, the Austin Journal of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and the American Research Journal of Biosciences – with one journal, the American Journal of Medical and Biological Research, accepting the paper provided a fee of $360 was paid.

Paul Gordon is the publisher and editor of iState.TV. He has published and edited newspapers, poetry magazines and online weekly magazines.
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